Windows Scenic Animation Overview

Posted By: Yochay Kiriaty | Jan 9th @ 9:28 AM | 63,407 Views | 19 Comments

Smooth animations are fundamental to many graphical UI applications, and Windows 7 introduces a native animation framework for managing the scheduling and execution of animations. The animation framework supplies a library of useful mathematical functions for specifying behavior over time and also lets developers provide their own behavior functions. The framework supports sophisticated resolution of conflicts when multiple animations attempt to manipulate the same value simultaneously. An application can specify that one animation must be completed before another can begin and can force completion within a set time. The new framework also helps animations determine appropriate durations

Watch Yochay Kiriaty, Windows 7 Technical Evangelist, and Windows Ribbon Scenic Animation product team members Paul Kwiatkowski and Paul Gildea as we explain Windows Scenic Animation, why we need it, and which components of Windows use this amazing technology. Paul also has few cool demos that show the real power of this technology.

For more technical content on Windows 7 and few cool code samples, go to the Windows 7 Blog for Developers.

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#Jan 9th @ 10:50 AM
deviants
deviants
Wow! Very exciting stuff. Can't wait to get the Beta.
#Jan 9th @ 12:03 PM
rhm
rhm
I've got a name for your feature: Core Animation

As a long time Windows developer I had my head burried in the sand about Macs. Since I've been learning it, it's been a revelation. If you have programmed on it you have no idea how nice it is to have a platform where all the cool stuff is in the native API. On Windows I have to make a really awkward decision: Use WPF to get the cool graphics, but then suffer massive memory consumption, have to pInvoke to do all the stuff that inexplicably hasn't been wrapped by the framework yet (anything to do with the shell, anything to do with media beyond a simple "play video" control); or you program native and have to invent everything from scratch.

On the Mac I'm missing managed code, but Objective-C isn't too bad. Hey, it's got databata binding in a native language without the ugly bandaid that is 'dependency properties' in WPF. And I get flashy graphics straight from the OS instead of resource hogging library ontop of it. If I want to write my own video editing app I can do everything I need using the Quicktime API. What do you on windows? Is DirectShow even still supported, or do you just bite to bullet and write your own video decoding libraries (or licence them from a third party at huge cost). Oh, and if you want to do anything sophisticated with video from within WPF, good luck.

I'm not going to predict anything stupid like Macs are going to take over - Window's position is almost complete unassailable - but what a mess the developer story is on it. I mean a seriously ugly mess. But hey, adding one more API can't hurt can it?...
#Jan 9th @ 5:27 PM
koistya
koistya
RIA Guy | Koistya `Navin
I love Win7 even though they has incredibly simplified it's UI in comparison to Vista.
#Jan 9th @ 5:34 PM
aL_
aL_
Rx ftw
err.. troll? Smiley
#Jan 9th @ 7:03 PM
rhm
rhm
Not really. Just telling it like it is.

What they've described in this video is exactly what Core Animation does in Mac OS X Leopard.

The rest of it is my reaction to yet another API as someone that's already been 'sold' WPF as the solution to doing graphics on Windows. If Microsoft don't think it's the solution, why should I?
#Jan 9th @ 7:21 PM
mycroft
mycroft
You're right, clearly Microsoft doesn't have much confidence in their own technology given how few of their internal projects use it. This extends to .NET as a whole and how poor managed access is to the win32 apis. 
WPF got there before Core Animation, but like so much of Microsoft's technology, they don't exploit it nearly as well as Apple dogfoods theirs. So why should anyone else?
#Jan 9th @ 7:22 PM
spivonious
spivonious

So now we have yet another way to draw things on the screen?  Why not focus on WPF and managed code?  The animation system in there is easy to use and is very capable.

#Jan 10th @ 3:42 AM
hak
hak

@aL_ 

Accept the fact, this is very similar to Core Animation, or maybe we should say a strip down copy of it. Microsoft does not invent anything new here, but rather provides another API for animations that can be used instead of WPF which has shown rather big limitations in many regards from my opinion.
#Jan 10th @ 1:51 PM
brian.shapiro
brian.shapiro
things go on as always
hak,

So what, its also similar to animation in WPF, and Microsoft got that started before Core Animation. The difference is that when Microsoft started they decided to do it through a managed library.

Maybe Microsoft should have done things this way to begin with, but anyone implying Microsoft is copying Apple is being a little dishonest about it, I think.

The original vision for Longhorn was a pie in the sky idea that every app would be using the managed API
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